Two months later, Copeland tracked down David Gunn to the Sporting Chance At The Goose Fair pub. There he confronted him and tape-recorded him admitting the attack. David threatened to shoot him if he saw him again. When the case came to court, Gunn denied he was even in the Standard of England on the night Copeland was beaten up. He said he had in fact been in the Sporting Chance that night and had witnesses to prove it. But by a majority verdict of 10-2, he was convicted at Nottingham Crown Court of grievous bodily harm and threats to kill.
Mr Justice Poole, presiding over the case, said there had been some provocation on Copeland’s part but added, ‘This kind of behaviour is quite intolerable and I have no alternative but to send you to prison.’ On 27 November 1998, he jailed Gunn to four years and nine months. It was a shock to the defendant, who had not expected such a heavy sentence and was desperate to keep out of prison with a baby on the way. He was also suffering from diabetes and had no faith in the health care within the prison system. Colin was even more affected by the sentence. Now he would have to run the Cartel without the support of his brother and without the stabilising influence that some of the Cartel believed David brought to Colin’s decision-making.
Nottinghamshire Police were pleased one of the Gunn brothers had been taken off the street but had been preoccupied with taking down other crime groups involved in drugs using sophisticated covert methods, which had resulted in the convictions of Wayne Hardy in September 1998 and would eventually result in the arrests and convictions of Robert Briggs-Price and Dave Francis by 2000. The jailing of Francis in particular left a gap in the East Midlands drugs market, from wholesale to street level. Colin Gunn could see this was well worth exploiting and set about recruiting middle-tier dealers who could negotiate their way through the tribal ganglands of the Meadows estate, St Ann’s and Radford. The Cartel would move into heroin and cocaine in a big way, the very drugs that Francis’s street dealers had been peddling in large quantities.
Having seen three members of the Gunn family convicted of criminal offences within a single year, the police were about to embark on an operation which, had it been followed through to its logical conclusion, would have halted David and Colin’s growing influence in its tracks and perhaps saved lives. The operation would be called Opal and it already had in its sights the very dealers Colin Gunn was recruiting. But Colin was also working on an audacious plan that he hoped would protect the long term future of the Cartel and their associates. Its success would eventually leave a trail straight back to his door, but for a time it would help the Cartel stay a step ahead of the police. The idea came to him after visiting one of his favourite clothes stores, Limey’s, in the centre of Nottingham. As one of the shop’s best customers, Colin had become very friendly with two of the employees, Jason Grocock, the store manager and one of his sales assistants, Charles Fletcher. An impressionable young man, he had expensive tastes in clothes. When Charlie told Gunn, one day in the summer of 1999, that he was leaving the store for good, Colin asked what he planned to do next.
‘I’m going to join the boys in blue,’ Fletcher told him.
Gunn couldn’t believe his ears. He already had some useful contacts in the police but, even if Fletcher never became a detective – as he planned – another lost soul in the force would be extremely beneficial. By filling the vacuum left by Dave Francis’s conviction, the Cartel was taking more risks and it was imperative to stay on top of the game. Another secret source of intelligence would be very welcome. Whether Charlie Fletcher knew it or wanted it, he was about to become a clean skin for the Bestwood Cartel. To refuse would be more than impolite.
CHAPTER 6
ne bright day in the spring of 2001, a woman is in the kitchen of her modest home in Dale End Road in the Derbyshire village of Hilton when her doorbell rings. She is expecting the visitors. They are police officers and are well known to her. They are not visiting her on official business. One of the officers, who has recently been working as a detective inspector in the elite National Crime Squad (NCS), is the woman’s lover. Two colleagues from the NCS’s Nottingham branch are with him. The scene is an unusual one. Cocaine is being chopped on the kitchen work surface and in the corner of the room another man is smoking a joint of cannabis. He is a prisoner on day release from HMP Ashwell, serving six-and-a-half years for drug offences. The detective inspector talks to the prisoner as a long-standing friend; he knows him well. After all, he had personally busted him a few years earlier. The DI argues with his mistress about who should feed her cat and who should chop out the lines of cocaine.
Unknown to any of them, a covert investigation into their activities, codenamed Operation Lancelot, is underway. For six months it has been following the DI’s every move, even tracking his car via the blue road camera networks across Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. A few months earlier, in the dead of night, officers from Merseyside Police had broken into the woman’s house, in Dale End Road, and hidden a listening device with a video camera somewhere in the kitchen area. This, it had been reasoned, was where most conversations would take place. Hours of footage turned out to be useless because the household cat’s favourite sleeping spot was in front of the pinhole camera lens, but now the Merseyside team were rubbing their hands in glee. They were in business.
Their target is David Redfern, a highly respected Derbyshire officer of eighteen years with a wall cabinet full of commendations, who until recently had been on secondment to the NCS. There is also likely to be collateral damage to those associating with him. Alongside him is Derbyshire colleague Detective Sergeant Mark Jennison and Nottinghamshire colleague Detective Constable Heather ‘Charlie’ Bossart. The other two people in the house are Redfern’s thirty-six-year-old mistress, Nicola Bladen, and David Jones, the prisoner enjoying a day on release. Redfern had collected Jones earlier that day from the prison and driven him to Bladen’s home. Redfern would later say in his defence that he was trying to recruit Jones as an informant.
The cocaine goes down well. Investigators hear the sniffles of the participants’ nostrils as it is inhaled. The blonde-haired DC Bossart is heard saying that the last time she took it she had gone shopping and it was so good she felt like ‘dancing in IKEA’. Redfern advises Mark Jennison how to avoid detection if caught with a wrap of cocaine: ‘What you do is you hand in a wrap of Charlie to the exhibits desk and say you took it off an informant. Then if you happen to get pulled on something and you have a wrap on you, you can say, “This is some stuff I just took off an informant, it’s not mine, I was just going to hand it in. Just check, I did the same thing a while back.” Honestly, it works every time.’
Jennison is restless. His kids are waiting for him in his car outside and he has to make tracks. The group slowly dissolves. Redfern has some work to do; he needs to see a potential informant in Nottingham. He has had a run-in with his bosses already. He was sent back to his home force in Derbyshire the previous year because of something to do with his informant handling. ‘Was it something to do with trying to register one of his informants in Nottingham?’ he wonders. He is not sure but is sure it’s not due to his coke-snorting antics, after all no one knows about that except those in the room with him and he always has an explanation if he gets caught with anything. He must have felt safe. Maybe he knew other officers who got up to no good. Who knows if a sergeant smokes a bit of cannabis now and again, or a constable sells knock-off clothing to some of his mates? Maybe everyone is at it and no one cares much if a detective turns a blind eye to the Class A drug-dealing that his informant is up to.
BY THE END of April 2001, the covert team of Merseyside officers working on Operation Lancelot had compiled enough damning evidence against the three police officers and their drug-taking friends to make their move. All the material from the covert surveillance was being overseen by a management board from the National Crime Squad. It was a situation without parallel, underlining the seriousness of the situation – the material on the bugs was only known to them and those compiling
the transcripts. The sensitivity of the material discussed on the bugs would present hurdles to negotiate once the case came to court, but no matter; the team was ready.
On Saturday, 28 April, in a series of dawn raids at their homes, Redfern, Jennison and Bossart were arrested along with seven other people, including two further Derbyshire officers, for alleged drug offences. The offices of the NCS in Nottingham and Belper were in turmoil. In addition, two of the NCS’s senior officers in the region, top boss Detective Chief Inspector Roger Hardy, senior manager Detective Inspector Ian Tucker and Detective Constable David Branston, were sent back to their home force, Derbyshire, in a move unconnected to the drug charges, though arising from intelligence received as a result of Operation Lancelot. It was later revealed in the High Court that they were told that the Director of the NCS, Bill Hughes, had lost confidence in the managerial abilities of the senior managers and questions had been raised about the informant handling going on in this NCS unit.
DI Tucker, who faced no disciplinary charges, later challenged the decision against him in the High Court. He had never been told what he was supposed to have done wrong, but such was the secrecy surrounding the case that even the High Court was unable to make a ruling to hear the case by judicial review. It was clear that Operation Lancelot had uncovered something more sinister than just the drug-taking, but taking it further would be a legal minefield opening up the possibility that previous convictions handled by the NCS unit in Belper could be challenged by jailed villains. This was an unprecedented moment in terms of policing at this level and a deeply embarrassing one for both Bill Hughes and the then Home Secretary, Jack Straw, who had set up the elite National Crime Squad in 1998 to replace the old regional crime squads. NCS officers were often perceived by both themselves and colleagues in more mundane police posts as the cream of the cream. Their role was to work in small teams of between six and ten officers, targeting the biggest criminals, who were often involved in large scale drug importation and organised crime.
By April 2001, some sixty-one detectives, from a total of 1,400, had been expelled from the NCS and sent back to their home forces. The scandal at the East Midlands units, however, was of another dimension: this was to be the first time that officers from one of the most elite police units in the country would be arrested and convicted. The NCS, which would later be swept under the umbrella of the newly formed Serious Organised Crime Agency, was only three years old and already some of its officers could not be trusted. By the time the case came to trial, at Northampton Crown Court in November 2002, Redfern, forty-two, and Bossart, forty, knew the game was up and pleaded guilty to possession of a Class A drug. In Redfern’s case, the charges also included possession with intent to supply and perverting the course of justice. Jennison, forty-one, denied supplying and possession of drugs but was convicted. Redfern was jailed for three years and nine months and Bladen for two years; both sentences were reduced on appeal on the grounds that the judge had been ‘manifestly excessive’ in his sentencing. Jennison was jailed for a year. Bossart received 100 hours community service for possessing cocaine. The officers were also dismissed from the Derbyshire force.
Rogue coppers are a blight on any police force but the repercussions when those involved are supposed to be part of an elite detective squad can undermine public confidence on a national scale. As Jon Murphy, Assistant Chief Constable of Merseyside Police, pointed out to a conference of the Association of Chief Police Officers in 2007, the police force is a reflection of the people who make up the society in which we live. ‘Society has changed and so have the people we recruit,’ he told the packed audience. ‘Many have been exposed to drug use, many have been involved in drug use – that involves purchasing substances and that involves criminal relationships. One thing we have learned is that once you cross that Rubicon there is no stepping back – even before officers and police staff join the service they can be compromised, this makes them vulnerable and this results in leakage of information and worse. It is not of course restricted to new recruits – there are vast amounts of criminal money swilling around the streets and some of it will inevitably be used to try to seduce and compromise our staff. Criminal corruption is borne out of poor culture, a culture where poor standards are tolerated.
‘Almost every investigation we complete tells us the same things: opportunities to get rid of corrupt individuals have previously arisen when they have come to notice before for bad behaviour, often resulting in discipline or even court. Yet the nettle has not been grasped. People bending the rules to get the job done ... we can all produce results if we play by different rules. Abject failure in supervision at every level – often why covert investigations create collateral damage. It is tragic watching, as I have, good people getting sucked into criminal conspiracies because they are too weak to challenge poor behaviour and consequently become increasingly compromised to the point where they can’t intervene without incriminating themselves. Intelligence is power and people want the power that access to our information and intelligence gives them. We rely greatly on the public to provide the information and intelligence that allows us to do the job. They provide it willingly, trusting us to protect it and use it appropriately. If we are not vigilant, our lifeblood will dry up and that hard-won trust and public confidence will be lost.’
By the late 1990s, senior police officers in Nottinghamshire suspected that there were a number of detectives involved in unhealthy relationships with criminals borne out of a less than rigorous informant system. Indeed the whole system was flawed. On paper the role of an informant and the role of the police or agency involved in it should be clear. The informant is usually an offender himself or herself and, in return for a favourable outlook on offences he or she may have committed, and sometimes a fee, they will agree to pass on information to a handler that would prevent crimes being committed by others of a greater magnitude. But the simplicity of it also made it ripe for abuse by both sides, particularly when the informant started to control the handler. The trouble would start when the informant would begin to use the handler to get away with their own crimes, to suck information from the handler and to plant information into the system which, while looking good for the handler, would also help the informant carry on with their illegal activities.
I met a detective who had two particular informants in Nottingham who he used to great effect, at least so far as ‘getting a result’ was concerned. I knew the history of both informants. One was a young black man who was a prolific drug dealer; so prolific, in fact, that he was dealing large amounts of cocaine to two Premiership footballers during in the mid to late 1990s. This young man, who I shall call Norbert, was willing to do anything to take out rival dealers in the city. On one occasion, there was to be a coke bust on a dealer who was hiding his double life as a takeaway owner in Nottingham city centre. Norbert had told the police about the man and dutifully agreed to go to him and see whether the gear was still there so they could carry out the raid.
‘He went in as planned but he was only supposed to do a reconnaissance to see whether the target had anything there at the premises,’ recounted the detective. ‘He came out as planned and gave us the signal that it was a goer. Sure enough the gear was there, several thousand pounds’ worth, but a bit less than there should have been. What Norbert had done was take a large amount off the bloke on tick to be paid for later and then left him to be busted. He knew that the guy was probably going straight to prison and there was no way that he was going to have to pay up. Not only that, Norbert got paid handsomely for the information he had given us. He was a winner on both counts.’
Another informant was a heroin dealer who we shall call Pamela. She was another prolific dealer who lived with a pimp and ran a number of prostitutes in the city. Time and time again she provided good information about the movement of heroin around the St Ann’s estate. She got paid thousands of pounds for her information but was actually passing on details of the large-scale dealers she herself was bu
ying from and also details of her own competitors. In one year alone she had salted away £100,000 from her trade in heroin, selling it at £1,000 per ounce. Pamela had security cameras on her door and, in effect, her own protection; the police let her deal as long as she came up with results. That carried on until she did get busted for heroin and couldn’t argue her way out of it. Results of a kind were clearly achieved but this was tainted by the fact that the information was being supplied in order to make the informant’s drug dealing activities profitable and eliminate her competition.
The Nottinghamshire Police department which dealt with corruption had been renamed the Professional Standards Unit (PSU) in 2001. It was headed up by Superintendent Michael Leyton, who had been one of the detectives leading the 1993 Eaton Green investigation when he was a detective inspector. He took to the task of investigating fellow officers with zeal, so much so that he sometimes attracted criticism from peers who felt his anti-corruption specialists were targeting the wrong people. Fervour was, though, the very characteristic needed to bring down corrupt officers, who, by the very nature of their work, knew how to cover their tracks – and which methods the PSU might use against them. Nevertheless, the determination of the PSU to nail a corrupt officer could often lead to blind spots and the chasing of red herrings. That was just what occurred in the early part of 2002 when a police officer, who was suspected of corruption, came under the PSU’s spotlight.
This man was a respected detective constable who specialised in handling informants and in undercover and surveillance work. He knew all the main players in Greater Nottingham and also knew the drugs trade inside out. He got excellent results, albeit by walking a fine line. That was sometimes the only way to catch the villains, he would say: you don’t get results by sitting in the office behind a computer – and he was right. But by 2001, the PSU had drawn up a list of officers who they believed fulfilled the criteria likely to make them corrupt, and this officer was one they were going to take a closer look at. He ticked some of the right boxes. He was ‘old school’ and had been doing the same kind of job for more than a decade; he hadn’t shown much inclination to rise above the rank of constable, preferring to be at the sharp end; and he had a large number of informants. He also enjoyed getting his hands dirty. He didn’t like paperwork and hated being stuck in the office.
NF (2010) Hoods Page 12